Living the Good Life, Episode 90 (July 14, 2018): The end of another anime, another notch to put on my MAL account…

VERY nice week, my friends! Both fun and productive! Here’s the lowdown…

WATCHAN:

Darling in the Franxx ep. 24 (Final): Well, this was…an ending. So after warping through the dimensional gate, Hiro and Diebuster 02 have to spend like 3 years traveling through space, and in the meanwhile their comrades have children (Mitsuru and Kokoro have a healthy baby girl, with more on the way after that, along with the other members of the team) and rebuild the entire planet, turning it green and healthy again after forbidding the use of “Magma Energy.” After that, Hiro and 02 manage to reach the VIRM final boss, but his body is giving out and the VIRM severely damage 02Buster, so only his friends back on earth reaching out and praying for him and 02 give them the strength to make a comeback and blow up all the VIRM with their bomb, sacrificing themselves in the process. But, hooray, centuries later they get reincarnated on a peaceful, prosperous Earth, and the show ends.

Eh…my thoughts on the ending? Well, as I mentioned on /m/,

“I wanted a happy ending, but I personally wasn’t expecting one. I mean, with 02 becoming a big mech and carrying the bomb with her, I was expecting them to have a “noble sacrifice” thing, and that’s what happened.

It’s a shame, I would have liked to have seen Hiro go full blue oni and come back to earth with red oni 02 and have a purple oni kid with her (and the sequel hook could have been the kid finishing the fight his/her parents began). I dunno, maybe it’s just me, but it’s pretty rare for mecha protags to actually come home and be family men, which is a shame as that’s a sort of happy ending I like. But instead they went and had Hiro and 02 being reincarnated, and strangely enough that seems more common to me. Yeah, this happened in the ending, but a whole bunch of /m/ and non-/m/ shows have ‘reincarnated lovers’ in them, like Gasaraki, I think Inuyasha, and so on. Well, I suppose it’s more of a cultural thing in Japan than it would be for a westerner like myself…”

Now, I should note that overall it was a happy ending–the VIRM were defeated, all of Hiro’s friends survived and started happy little families and so on, but I meant a happy ending for the hero and his love–I wish they survived the final battle and went back to their friends, though again, reincarnation isn’t that bad of a fate. Still, you have to admit that any happy ending where the heroes sacrifice themselves is at least *slightly* bittersweet. Anyways, the other cliched thing was “everyone’s prayers give the protags extra strength to help them beat the last boss.” I mean, that’s what they did in Earthbound in the final fight, the essence of Goku’s spirit bomb in DBZ, and a lot of other stuff to boot. I guess cliches can be reassuring, so I can’t complain that much.

So what did I think of the series overall? Eh…I’d give it a 6.5, maybe rounded up to 7 out of ten. I really enjoyed Hiro’s relationship with 02, and I thought the mecha design was pretty nice. However, there was a lot that went wrong, IMO. It seemed like the writers didn’t have a strong hand on where the plot was going, with the VIRM just popping up like that. I could also have done without the drama, like the teen pregnancy stuff. And Hiro was a pretty bland, paint by the numbers “unremarkable brown/black-haired protagonist” who wouldn’t have been memorable if not for his relationship with 02. The mecha action/fight choreography was also merely serviceable, not above-average. But despite all that…I am a hell of a sucker for a nice love story, so I still enjoyed the series overall. Thus my relatively high score 😀

Aside from that, I got a ton of work done on one chapter of my secret project. I think I’ll be able to move on to another phase soon 😀

So yeah, can’t say too much about that, since it’s my “secret” project, but rest assured this week has been very productive for me. I hope the next is even better! It feels good to get stuff done, indeed.